The Kiss can help is to think about the construction of memoir and personal memories that have been submerged in the psyche and find artful expression. Compare what is happening in this incest narrative with the treatment of memory in Shelley's Matilda or Isabella Robinson's diaries. On what level does truth exist and what obligation does a writer have to others involved in her story?
The confessional memoir:
First let's consider this NYT review:BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Life With Father: Incestuous and Soul-Deadening
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Published: February 27, 1997
THE KISS
A Memoir
By Kathryn Harrison
207 pages. Random House. $20.
Why do human beings commit incest? In her appalling
but beautifully written memoir, ''The Kiss,'' Kathryn Harrison, the
novelist, isn't primarily concerned with analyzing what happened between
her and her father. She interweaves a series of dire events that
occurred during the first 25 years of her life, jumping back and forth
in time yet drawing you irresistibly toward the heart of a great evil.
Her narrative is spare and stark, written in a
present tense that perfectly conveys how her experience happened ''out
of time as well as out of place.'' ''We meet at airports,'' she begins,
plunging the reader straight into the hell of the incestuous affair.
''We meet in cities where we've never been before. We meet where no one
will recognize us. . . . these nowheres and notimes are the only home we
have.''
Then she goes back to the start of her experience,
when she first meets her estranged father as an adult. ''My father
looks at me, then, as no one has ever looked at me before.'' Having not
seen her since 10 years earlier, when she was 10, he is enthralled by
her resemblance to him. When she drives him to the airport, he kisses
her goodbye and ''pushes his tongue deep into my mouth: wet, insistent,
exploring, then withdrawn.''
She writes: ''In years to come, I'll think of the
kiss as a kind of transforming sting, like that of a scorpion: a
narcotic that spreads from my mouth to my brain. The kiss is the point
at which I begin, slowly, inexorably, to fall asleep, to surrender
volition, to become paralyzed. It's the drug my father administers in
order that he might consume me. That I might desire to be consumed.''
You read on, for once dreading instead of looking
forward to the inevitable consummation. You are stunned by the author's
imagery of despair: the cockroach she traps under a glass the last night
of her father's first visit, when she discovers that he is sleeping
with her mother. The ''dim, drowned light'' in the basement apartment
she rents when his obsessive attention forces her temporarily to
withdraw from college after her junior year. The Polaroids her father
takes of her naked: ''The expression on my face, flat and dispossessed,
is one I see years later in a museum exhibit of pictures taken of
soldiers injured during the Civil War.''
The reader's defense to this onslaught can only be
to try to understand. And Ms. Harrison, while not analytical, spins a
complex web of clues involving narcissism, repressed desire, her
mother's emotional inaccessibility, her father's hunger to recapture the
past and her own need for substantiation.
She writes: ''From a mother who won't see me to a
father who tells me I am there only when he does see me: perhaps,
unconsciously, I consider this an existential promotion. I must, for
already I feel that my life depends on my father's seeing me.''
But if any single emotion lies behind what happens,
it is rage. The author feels rage at her mother's coldness, and avenges
herself by possessing what her mother claims still to love. Her father
feels rage at having been banished from his marriage, and avenges
himself by possessing what survives of it.
''The greatest blindness we share, my father and I,
is that neither of us knows how angry we are,'' she writes. ''It's
perhaps because I cannot admit my fury that I don't see what he hides
from himself. And he, long practiced in self-deception, doesn't see my
anger either.
''Whatever passions we feel, we call love.''
What remains inexplicable is how Ms. Harrison
survived not only incest but also rejection by both her parents as a
young child, which led in turn to bouts of anorexia, bulimia and
suicidal depression. How, given such a history, could she have become an
academic star, a successful novelist and a wife and mother? How could
she have survived at all?
Knowing that she did survive, one grasps at hints in
''The Kiss'' that her mother's parents, with whom she lived, gave her
the necessary love and security. Yet she characterizes her maternal
grandmother as a selfish, manipulative woman, and she writes that her
grandfather rejected her when she reached puberty. In the end, the
mystery of her healthy survival remains a flaw in her memoir.
Still, ''The Kiss'' is a powerful piece of writing, a
testament to evil and hope. You wonder only if its power is too
concentrated. In it Ms. Harrison has reworked the material she treated
as fiction in her first two novels, ''Thicker Than Water'' and
''Exposure.'' At the end of a praising review of ''Thicker Than Water''
published in 1991, the novelist Scott Spencer asked astutely if that
novel's autobiographical elements hadn't overwhelmed its art. ''Are we
witnessing the beginning of a brilliant career or a bleeding soul's
attempt to bind itself in a tourniquet of words?'' he asked. ''Can a
novel ring too true for its own good?''
In ''The Kiss,'' Ms. Harrison effectively reverses
the terms of this question, and makes you wonder if a memoir can ring
too artistic for the truth.
Photo: Kathryn Harrison. (Joyce Ravid/Random House)
Then, this consideration of the confessional memoir as a feminist attempt to overcome the gaze:
- Our Stories, Ourselves. By: ZARUM, LARA, New Republic, 00286583, Dec2015, Vol. 246, Issue 13
- Database:
- Academic Search Complete
Our Stories, Ourselves
Contents
FEMINISM
up front
Is confessional writing feminist?
IN 1972, THE art critic John Berger wrote, "Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at." Berger was writing about the depiction of women in classic oil paintings, but he could have been speaking about so much personal writing on the internet today. In the past decade, a vast online space--web sites like Thought Catalog, Rookie, and xoJane--has opened up for women to write about their early confrontations with adulthood, preferably with emphasis on their growth from awkward girls to complicated (yet desirable) women. The internet's appetite for confessional writing points many young writers inward--not necessarily because they have something pressing to say but because, for women in particular, a pitch based on a traumatic personal experience is a reliable way to get an editor's attention. And for many women writers, this has proved a successful career path.
Some argue that confessional writing is a radical act, providing a template for women to be their own subjects. The troubling paradox, however, is that, in their quest to spin a narrative out of the fabric of their lives, these writers often fall back on the old objectifying impulses. Four decades after Laura Mulvey coined the term "male gaze," we're working on getting rid of the "male," but that "gaze" is still all-important. In recent years, a spate of memoirshave been published by women in their twenties. Writers like Aspen Matis, the young author of the memoir Girl in the Woods, or Lily Brooks-Dalton, who recently published her first book, Motorcycles I've Loved, begin by commodifying their own womanhood.
Matis's disappointing memoir resembles a classic makeover story, set in motion with a narrative of catastrophe and salvation. On her second night at college, a boy she'd only met that night rapes Matis in her dorm room. Shaken, she drops out after her freshman year and hikes the Pacific Crest Trail. By the end, she has shed her "post-rape fat," traded in glasses for contact lenses, changed her first name, and gotten hitched.
"I was ugly, had bad posture and thick glasses. I was chubby, my curly hair a mess, I felt unattractive, I always had," Matis writes near the beginning of Girl in the Woods. "I was unseen. I had always been unseen." Later, Matis is pleased to report that she feels beautiful for herself, not for any man.
The emphasis on visibility, on being seen, is not unique. In Motorcycles I've Loved, Brooks-Dalton finds herself frustrated by men who belittle her, call her "cute," and question her biking credentials. A petite woman, she "could never quite reconcile this discrepancy between who I wanted to be and who I appeared to be.
People looked at me a little differently when I arrived in leather, on two wheels, and it made me begin to look at myself differently, too." In Andie Mitchell's debut memoir, It Was Me All Along, being seen is more explicitly front-and-center: The book is about the author's lifelong struggle with her weight. When a cute guy asks her to prom, Mitchell has finally gotten "exactly what I'd wanted. To be seen. To be seen as beautiful."
Our culture loves to gawk at the ugly side of women--to peer at stars without their makeup and publish their un-Photo-shopped images, to put women's looks under a microscope until every blemish surfaces. It's not surprising that so many women writers respond to this scrutiny by taking ownership of their own looks. And yet there's a strange self-consciousness to these very polished and often engaging narratives, a desire to look good while looking bad that is unsettling. Taken together, these memoirs suggest that to be a woman is first and foremost, in Berger's words, to be "an object of vision: a sight."
After I read these books, I picked up Vivian Gornick's latest memoir, The Odd Woman and the City. Reading Gornick on the heels of these memoirswas like dipping my feet into a cool, clear lake after walking barefoot on hot pavement. Gornick's prose is taut, shot through with a youthful energy that belies her 80 years. Her subject--the quest to find her essential self--is the same. But the point of her memoirs is not to reveal that self to the world. As she put it in an interview last year with Believer, "The story is everything."
As women, we regard ourselves as objects to be seen practically from the moment of birth. Perhaps it's a radical inversion to flip the lens and gaze at our own bodies and into our own minds. But I find that impulse depressing. It makes these young authors seem not like writers with ideas to share but things to be hawked. It speaks to a culture that sees young women as valuable primarily when the product they're selling is the most intimate, and often humiliated, version of themselves.
"IT HAPPENED TO ME": HEADLINES FROM WOMEN'S LIFESTYLE WEB SITE, XOJANE
I Used Crystal Meth To Lose Weight
I Was the Fat Mistress
I Had Plastic Surgery That Went Horribly Wrong
I Went on a Date to a Sex Dungeon
~~~~~~~~
By LARA ZARUM


